2.3 General blade server architecture

A general blade server architecture is shown in Figure 1. The hardware components of a blade server are the switch blade, chassis (with fans, temperature sensors, etc), and multiple compute blades. Some vendors offer, partner, or plan to partner with companies that provide application specific blades that provide traffic conditioning, protection, or network processing prior to the traffic reaching the compute blades. Often, these application specific blades may be functionally positioned between the switch blade and compute blades. However, these blades reside in a standard compute blade slot.

The outside world connects through the rear of the chassis to a switch card in the blade server. The switch card is provisioned to distribute packets to blades within the blade server. All these components are wrapped together with network management system software provided by the blade server vendor. The specifics on the blade server architecture vary from vendor to vendor. But before you discount this as a bunch of proprietary architectures, think again. Remember that IBM and others dramatically advanced and proliferated the PC architecture, changing the face of computing forever.

The blade server industry appears to be headed in the same direction. There are some areas where standardization of blade server components will prove helpful. However, blade server vendors ability to quickly adapt and advance their architectures to suite specific applications unencumbered by the standards process will prove to accelerate proliferation in the near term.